not sure where the link to Michael Shanks site comes up, but the syllabus for his course Ten Things is deLightful and incisive. he’s got some really interesting thoughts on the life of objects, the presence of humans, and the history of both.

If we look at processes as well as discrete objects, we can be led into a myriad of connections and trajectories. In the heterogeneous networking that is the engineering of a thing, there is no end to ramification. An artifact disperses through its scenarios, networks and genealogies of origination, manufacture, distribution, use and discard.

Interpretation, as re-articulation, can track certain affiliations or lines of connection, as I sketched with the aryballos. There is always more that remains unsaid, unacknowledged, unseen, because interpretation may not go down a particular track. This is so evident in archaeological fieldwork, or indeed in any scientific research, where there is always a choice to be made of what matters to the research interest. What is left behind, ignored or discarded is the background noise of history and experience. This is far from inconsequential. First, because something important may have been overlooked. Science constantly takes a second look at things and finds something that was missed. Second, because things stand out as significant against this background; without it there could be no story, no message, no understanding. Third, because this is the noise of the ambient everyday work that makes society what it is; it is the noise of the life of things constantly reweaving our social fabric. — Michael Shanks

I recently tracked down Andreas Voigt, a documentary film-maker that I met back in the early 1990′s at a film festival in Reykjavík. He was present for the screening of his deeply moving black-and-white features made in and around Leipzig in the late 80′s and early 90′s during the early post-Cold Wars days (Letztes Jahr – Titanic and Leipzig im Herbst). He emails me that his most recent documentary, Mit Rentiernomaden über den Ural is on tonight. Christian and I watch while Steffi is out at choir practice. very fine work.

catching up with the kids to see how they grow. and plenty of chances to participate in the raptor hunting/feeding events despite the icy snow and such weather that I’m not so used to.

prepping to leap? or to merely stand still, justly, or, perhaps, verily. I do say unto you. all these texts and images. 2007 will be the peak year for the neoscenes travelog. it can’t become a more time-consumptive project, or, god-help-me, it’ll end up nah’ good for da body in this in-car-nation. counting the hours? counting the ROI (return-on-investment)? the social benefits that arise from this work? practically infinite for the first question, practically zero for the last two. and with significant chunks of life-time going in to this, and nothing coming out from it. why-oh-why do I persist? bulldog jaw spasms onto the carotid.

The act of seeing (active) gradually changing in the act of looking (passive) is exactly what modern global capitalism is doing with human mankind. By replacing the means to create a life (rurality, agriculture, self-protecting, autocratic societies) with the means to earn a life (industries, labour, rent, mortgage, salary, funeral insurance), the emphasis slowly drifts from the active sense to the passive sense. This is exemplified by the way the internet developed from a research instrument to an entertainment device. In this process which lasted a surprisingly short time of about ten years, the presence of the web turned from a small interesting peer-to-peer group to a huge beast of millenarian proportions. The monster as the natural companion of a gigantic destroyer. The spider’s web is eyeing the world , the eye lost its vision and is multiplied inwardly on a enormous scale , blinded by its own image like the drowning men filming their own drowning in a drowning world. — A. Andreas (cited from nettime)

meet Wolfgang at the Pergamon and on to an exhibition at the Mitte Museum am Festungensgraben that some of his students participated on. Sensing the streets.

Farben, Töne, Gerüche – viele Sinneseindrücke, Stimmungen und Empfindungen werden beim Gang durch eine Strasse ausgelöst. Um diese sinnliche Wahrnehmung städtischer Räume geht es in der Ausstellung “Sensing the Street. Eine Strasse in Berlin”. Sie ist Ergebnis eines gemeinsamen Forschungs- und Ausstellungsprojekts des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie dem UNI.K –UdK. Studio für Klangkunst und Klangforschung und dem Institut für Kunst im Kontext an der Universität der Künste Berlin. Am Beispiel von drei repräsentativ ausgewählten Strassen – Acker-, Adalbert- und Karl-Marx-Strasse – wird der Strassenraum multisensorisch, d.h. visuell, auditiv, olfaktorisch und taktil erfahrbar gemacht.

I meet and talk to Friederike, one of the students involved at some length, mainly encouraging her with the project — they have, indeed, made a very nice manifestation of research. and this is only the first of three absolutely different exhibitions in different venues entirely in the next two weeks. I would wish to be around for the other two. it was an opening, so that it was crowded and hot, but we got there earlier than the crowds and got to check out the especially provocative audio and video works.

Art is the image of a human being, This means that when a person is confronted with art, then they are in fact confronted with their own self, and so open their own eyes. And so it is the creative person who is addressed, their creativity, their freedom, their autonomy. And this is only possible using the concept of art, however, this concept must be made more comprehensive. You cannot and should not deal with this concept traditionally and say: that is what artists do, and that is what engineers do?. but you can get beyond the concept. And the only escape route is a more comprehensive concept of art that is anthropological and that is taken seriously: that everyone is an artists, and that every person has a creative core. — Joseph Beuys

Wolfgang and I continue our conversation a bit later at a cafe (after I meet Barbara, an old friend of Volker’s!), then I race back over to the Pergamon for a longer walk-through, then it’s back home to get some packing done. Roman is there and asks for some help editing a copy of the manifesto that he and Alexei are working on for Transmediale. then I crash for the early wake-up.

over in Lübeck, meet miga and then head to lunch with Andreas at Nui which I remember from the teaching at ISNM before. had to get some outline of what is happening to the slowly sinking Titanic and what is required from me when I do a short course on e-culture in the spring.

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.

and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.

should never have allowed only a day for this one. White Mountain Peak, 14208 ft. (4331 meters). it was a choice between that and Mt. Whitney, 14500 ft. (4420 meters). not a clear choice, though a repeat of Whitney would have been nice. but with a 22 mile (36 km) round trip distance and 5500 ft. (1700 meter) elevation gain, doing it in one day is a brutal pre-dawn-to-after-dark excursion. that and it was a weekend, and probably one of the busiest weekends of the summer in the Sierras with the Perseid meteor shower showing up as well. Whitney can see 500 people on days like that, not to mention that one needs a permit to do the hike. no time to get to the National Forest office on Lone Pine to get one. so, a fine second-best choice. I’d been wanting to get up to the Bristlecone Pine Wilderness area since the early 1980′s, so this was a perfect opportunity. north of Bristlecone is the Barcroft Station one of the UC high-altitude research stations situated on a shoulder of White Peak Mountain. it’s possible to drive in about 30 miles to a locked gate below the research station at around 12000 ft. (3600 meters). unless you have special dispensation to possess the gate key, you have to park there and do the seven miles in to the peak. otherwise, you could shave three miles off the round-trip distance. I might have made it if that had been the situation… so, no need to give the details except I missed by a mile and 800 vertical feet. right hip cramped. no cardio-vascular issues which was gratifying for the first 14,000-footer attempt in the last decade, and two years following the accident.

hitched a ride for last of the 12 miles with a woman who works at the research station. she couldn’t bear to leave me hobbling in her dust trail.

then it was on to the Bristlecone Pine area to check out the trees. could barely walk around. back down to 8000 feet to sleep better, though it is 40 F warmer as well. the Perseids are nothing special, unfortunately. and so, cold stellar places left behind for the time being.

the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…

over at the Pakhuis de Zwijger offices, a too-short meeting with some of the staff, to explore research methodologies that extend into art-making. one hour simply is not enough to generate dialogue — it is good only for talking about issues at people. not with people. the network develops at the speed of life. later, dialogues spring up out of the initial meeting context, with vigor — accentuating the problematic one-hour theory. dialogues which are the point and an expression of (my) methodology per se.

also met the current keyworx development crew, Lodewijk & Jokke. to see the whole new Open Source paradigm, including the web-based patcher. looking forward to alpha and beta testing!

trying to get more job applications in, but time is so packed with meetings, there is only peripheral possibility. but the UNSW/COFA one is in and good. at least the interview process will be in hand whilst in Sydney.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walk man: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard

is it worth it in the end?

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to a dance performance by choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that she is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.

Chris mentioned that old-and-very-possibly ex-friend George Saunders just had a MacArthur Fellowship bestowed on hissef. well, dang, George, congrats! I had to chuckle when I went to his fan site and saw it had been hacked by a Turkish Armenian freedom fighter — complete with a waving flag and anthem. it’s back up now…

George’s latest short story collection, In Persuasion Nation gets qualified critical acclaim as is likely with a collection of stories. I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for a 600+ page novel to wield baseball-bat-to-torso, outlining in bruised flesh the practice, not of resistance to the contemporary cultural brutality, but of a thoughtlessly new way-of-going. potential’s there, but somehow mundaneity clogs the sweat pores. put a hold at the local library on Nation, review forthcoming.

Following his superb story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (1999), as well as last year’s novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Saunders reaffirms his sharp, surreal vision of contemporary, media-saturated life, but keeps most of the elements within his familiar bandwidth. In the sweetly acerbic “My Flamboyant Grandson,” a family trip through Times Square is overwhelmed by pop-up advertisements. In “Jon,” orphans get sold to a market research firm and become famous as “Tastemakers & Trendsetters” (complete with trading cards). “CommComm” concerns an air force PR flunky living with the restless souls of his parents while covering for a spiraling crisis at work. The more conventionally grounded stories are the most compelling: one lingers over a bad Christmas among Chicago working stiffs, another follows a pair of old Russian-Jewish women haunted by memories of persecution. Others collapse under the weight of too much wit (the title story especially), and a few are little more than exercises in patience (“93990,” “My Amendment”). But Saunders’ vital theme — the persistence of humanity in a vacuous, nefarious marketing culture of its own creation — comes through with subtlety and fresh turns. — Publishers Weekly

long day in the city. starting in the United Nations Plaza which is, definitely a coagulation of spirits. first scenario visiting the eye on regaining ground-level from the Civic Center BART station is that of a seagull in the process of eviscerating a live pigeon. by the time I film, the pigeon is dead. the second scenario: to kill time, I drop in at the Asian Art Museum where the guards start to check everything in my backpack and begin to recite a mantra of all the things that cannot be brought in or used or done (or thought!) in the Museum. I stop them, and say that I am not interested in participating in their particular little corner of the social system, pack my bag and walk out. and head back along streets brimming with urine-reek, the displaced homeless, flophouse hotels, and so on. at a stop Light, a woman standing next to me asks the world in general how can I restart my career? I look at her and say I was going to ask you the same thing! it is clear that social empowerment is at an extreme low here in the center of San Francisco.

lunch with Casey, and on to a rendezvous with Sophea and Amanda. a double espresso puts an edge on the afternoon. on the way, evidence of a TAZ is spotted: a good omen! although the juxtaposition with other street scenes previously experienced in the day raises many questions about the way a TAZ might be expressed in this time, in this socio-political system.

on to Whole Foods for breakfast provisions, Casey goes home to study, we head back to Amanda’s place to prep for the trans-national breakfast with the Sydney

and Adelaide crews at 1630 local time. the breakfast — French Toast, fruit compote, pashed (!) potatoes, and champagne is streamed and rebroadcast on free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY as part of the live_feed: Breakfast Radio streaming project. the overall performance was initiated by Andrew Burrell and the Hybrid Radio Research Group as part of the Aural Degustation: Tasty Bites to Feed the Ears exhibition at the SCA Galleries at the SCA in Sydney, Australia. participants included: (in Adelaide): Mimi Kelly, Sasha Grbich, Jen Brazier, Heidi Angove, and Tamara Baille ; (in San Francisco): Amanda Hendricks, Sophea Lerner, and John Hopkins; (in San Diego – special telematic drop in): Amanda MacDonald-Crowley; (in Sydney): Lia Smith, Amber Moloney, Clara Chow, Bjel Bakker, Belle Brooks, Heidi Abraham, Sach Catts, Alli Barnard, and last-but-not-least, Andrew Burrell.

Unless we accept that at this point in intellectual and scientific history that some radical re-learning is necessary, we cannot hope to move forward in the compulsive history of the ambivalent rejection-fascination with consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My proposal implies that every good student of cognitive science who is also interested in issues at the level of mental experience, must inescapably attain a level of mastery in phenomenological examination in order to work seriously with first-person accounts. But this can only happen when the entire community adjusts itself to the corresponding acceptance of arguments, refereeing standards and editorial policies in major scientific journals, that can make this added competence an important dimension of a young researcher. To the long-standing tradition of objectivist science this sounds like anathema, and it is. But this is not a betrayal of science: it is a necessary extension and complement. Science and experience constrain and modify each other as in a dance. This is where the potential for transformation lies. It is also the key for the difficulties this position has found within the scientific community. It requires us to leave behind a certain image of how science is done, and to question a style of training in science which is part of the very fabric of our cultural identity. — Francisco Varela

hunting more background on the ‘structural holes’ issue that Burt raises in relation to the geometry of links in a social network. Goyal, in laying out the question of whether or not connectivity is a sustainable strategy, formulates the ground conditions.

We develop a simple model of network formation to address this question. We consider a setting where interaction between every pair of individuals generates a surplus. If two individuals are directly linked then they split this surplus equally, while if they are indirectly connected — there are other players in the ‘path” between them — then the division of surplus depends on the competition between these intermediaries. In this setting, there are three types of incentives for individuals to form links with others. The first incentive is the desire to create surpluses: individuals would like to join the network so as to create exchange possibilities which in turn create surpluses. The second incentive is related to the rewards from intermediation: players would like to place themselves between others in order to extract rents from intermediation. The third incentive arises out of the desire to avoid sharing surpluses with intermediaries; in other words, individuals will try to circumvent intermediate players to retain more of the surplus for themselves. — Sanjeev Goyal

this allusion to a surplus in the connection between two individuals is one of the first uses found in network theory that is in the direction of my research — where a core outcome of the series of bi-directional connections that occur in an open network is a surplus of energy. back to the 1+1=3 theory. the extraction of ‘rent’ however brings up an entirely different mechanism. the mechanism is the applied attenuation of social strictures (as applied through the full range of ‘technological’ mediation) that extracts energy from the pair of engaged individuals — in this case, the third party happens to be in control of the ‘spending’ of energy from that immediate social energy bank. so, two separate and very different dynamics happening, not degrees of the same mechanism.

Starting off the month with reading more from and about David Bohm, the quantum physicist and researcher into the nature of human relation (in the form of his defined term, dialogue). He maintained a suspicion about language, that it formed a mechanism which reified that-which-was-being-talked-about as it was (being) manifest in language. The idea that thought tends to impress a static order on the world outside. (And meanwhile, accepting the premise that all reality is a dynamic procession, thought included.) However, there is an inexorable process — as thought creates knowledge from reality (experience) — that seeks to lock in a fragmentary (incomplete) view excised from reality. This is one general characteristic of linguistic representation of dynamic reality. In a similar vein, Walter Ong (2002) maintained that the transition from aural to written to printed language defined deep shifts in the relation of the Self to the Other and to reality. He compiled a set of characteristics of expressed/expressive thought (=spoken word) that supports the necessary salience of aurally transmitted information (as there were no other ways to catch / statify information in aural cultures):

expression is additive rather than subordinate;
it is aggregate rather than analytic;
it tends to be redundant or “copious;”
the process tends to be conservative;
out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close references to lived reality;
expression is agonistically toned;
it is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced;
it is homeostatic;
it is situational rather than abstract

The key to most of these characteristics is that they directly relate to embodied presence versus the absence (and abstractedness!) of a (printed) text. So that here, in this blog, there is a long sequence of absences, separations — which together accumulate as disembodied virtuality. Ong elsewhere hints about the cumulative effect of this movement from embodied connection with language to the abstractions of mediation introduced by printed texts. And on into the further mediation in telephony (all ‘tele’ or attenuated/virtual realities I would suggest). Socialization is that process of abstraction and reification of what were once active and dynamic processes happening at a granular level of human-to-human. The process moving from dialogue to incontrovertible law (protocol) is a mapping of the ‘advance’ of a social system. Yet, social order is dependent on that dynamic of that granular ground state of the system — at least if a society wishes to retain a vital edge on evolutionary survival. It is precisely this reification process that spells the doom of a social system — though often not before that system has attained a temporary advantage over other systems (by being more efficient in a materialist way), and caused great suffering and alienation.

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor's note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 which set life on another trajectory.]

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. (more …)

this mornings research through the landscape of information theory in biology, neurobiology, and genetics brings me to many places, including the following. rhetorical clusters.

(learn more)
nomological emergence, nonformal patterns, mereological emergence, feminist science scholarship, mechanism schemata, statistical relevance relationships, teleosemantic information, nomological supervenience, emergent with respect, successful intertheoretic reduction, mereological supervenience, basic physical parts, epistemological emergence, pointer observable, textbook semantics, biorthogonal decomposition, ceteris paribus problem, reasoning from data, causal mechanical model, qualified ceteris paribus, criteria for lawfulness, algebraic states, phenetic species, process structuralists, representational items

last day of swimming at the college pool. closing for a year’s worth of re-modeling. been using this pool for many hundreds of kilometers over the 20 years visiting this place.

spending much time on research of network theory and history, but not finding much online — most journals are still not available online to the public. I could access some sites when I was in the Uni-Bremen network, where I could download any paper from the ACM site (which includes hundreds or thousands of papers), but not when I am logged on normally from here, walls around cultural resources.

also contemplating the blogging thing again. seeing how it has evolved from the simple posting of html content (here are pictures of my family) to a massive intertwined blogo-sphere with its own social hierarchy-of-consumption. the interlinking and comment possibility seems productive, but there is an element of incestuousness that makes it often the victim of circular illogic.

advice from Frieder:

Students often ask:
What should I consider when doing research?

Here are four important advices.

Give a very precise formulation of the problem. Improve it over and over again.
Know how others have treated the same problem.
When you encounter difficulties, find out where they come from.
Make explicit what your contribution to science progress will be.
– Frieder Nake

time slips. many direct impressions, people, dialogues. and that directly keeps time away from the keyboard of this machine. for some measure of being that shifts away from mediation to the contingencies of momentary presence. as usual, when visiting Volker, we spend much time meeting and visiting with local artists and connections he has in the Köln area. the evening with Thomas was interesting, jumping into the Catholic church where there is an exhibition opening for Rune Mields. the work is about her research into the numerous convents that were once scattered around the center of Köln, and the process of secularization initiated by Napoleon that destroyed them. Thomas has had MS for more than 25 years but remains upbeat about his situation and intense about his artistic ambitions: brilliant!

this is the winter solstice: no better place to spend it than the Mojave Desert. bumping slowly into a canyon that dead-ends into the Mojave Wilderness area, in a cirque of sorts, nothing like a cirque in the Rockies or the Alps, but still, a surrounding of rough garbled slopes leading upward into what are definitely mountains. Larrea tridentata (creosote bush), and a variety of small brittle brush plants, sand, rock, desert armor, cryptobiotic soil, and that’s about it. animals are here, but seldom seen. lizards by day, a few insects around sunset, but otherwise it is silent except for the throbbing of blood in ears and the assorted noises of body, movement, and living. machine takes on a massive presence by its sound. stove heating water can be heard 100 meters away, hard drive chattering to itself, an loud insect in a box.

dream of the Mojave on 12-14 September 2001. stripping away the frequent aircraft would be the last hurdle. though the drive to get here illustrated that this area is under assault from every quarter. the air itself is hazy up to 2000 meters or more. this must be auto pollution from eLAy, immediately upwind. there is a huge dust storm that rakes from north to south, near the Cadiz dry lake, along a cutoff that I was going to take, but couldn’t locate the road properly as I hadn’t a copy of that quad map. had to go on west, skirting Joshua Tree National Park, and take Iron Mountain road to the Amboy road and north across the Sheep Rock Mountains and the Amboy dry lake, the Chlorite works, and finally to Amboy, more deserted than it was in 1983 when I first visited. actually quite rundown at this point. east towards Cadiz and the Marble Mountains where I choose a bad gravel road, make a few detours, and finally enter a wide wash right on the perimeter of the Wilderness area. and presumably quite near a Latham Shale outcrop. have to triangulate in the morning, based on some field photos that I found online.

this is the first time I have returned to a place like this since Internet-time has come. it is quite interesting to research a location, using topographic, historic, cultural, and scientific names to find online info about many aspects. for example, a report detailing the eco-recovery of areas that were used by General Patton between 1942-44 for massive maneuver practices (over 1,000,000 men!) which destroyed huge swaths of the desert ecology in California, Nevada, and Arizona. thanks George C. Scott!

getting colder already. sunset early, around 1700, and just two hours later, the temperature has dropped 30F. got to go get bed set up in the back of the truck. maybe tomorrow I’ll sleep on the ground. such a rare opportunity that it shouldn’t be passed up.

time slips into the next several steps, with no spare to make reflexive jottings here. now in Catonsville, on a long-delayed visit with Steve, about to do a collab stream as part of his art@radio project which takes the form of a weekly streamed hour of sonic art works and a variety of other collab sonic streaming projects. it was previously airing on WMBC, the university student station, but with infrastructure improvements, Steve can now broadcast a stream from home via nicecast to a server maintained by the IRC

back on routes, a grueling week from Iceland to Denmark, to New York to Maryland to San Francisco. all in seven days. after the early morning departure from Ice Land in a chill dark snowy wind. nothing else but. so it goes. leave-taking, the usual heart pain.

dash away for a lunch and meeting with Søren in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at the Åarhus UNiversity. then a brief stop at the Art Academy of Jutland, home of splab, to meet Tanja and take a tour of the place to satisfy my always-keen curiosity to see schools and organizations on the ground. run into mr. noisejihad himself, Mikko, who participated in both di-fusion events and was a co-curator of the Overgaden festival as well. connections, connected, but the total brevity of the visit makes it almost useless. feeling antsy about getting somewhere, and the in between sensation gets overpowering when stops are too short. needing like a week to chill and engage anymore. and I didn’t even visit folks in Iceland hardly. nomad leaves for the steppes where stars are hard and cold, and many. check out. rocketing through the night by train, in the hvileplads car (the quite-place). phones and talking are banned. I lucked out getting a seat in this car, the train seems pretty full. yeah, just noticed that I haven’t heard anyone speak except for the conductor going through asking for tickets. even the guy selling food didn’t really say anything, but is suddenly smiling in my face.

just as I had observed and inferred from bits of data that I have seen over the past few years. that the US is in serious crisis regarding the precipitous drop in the numbers of creative talent entering the country. graduate students are not turning up in droves as they used to, populating all the hard-core science, business, and technology programs at the best US universities. they are staying home or going to European, Asian, and other societies which are not so repressive and paranoid as the neoconservative fascists in power now in the US. so, reading the article “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” in the Harvard Business Review that enumerates the extremity of the situation only confirms my observations. empire continues its decline with the deluded self-knowledge of ascending to the millennial realms of power and righteous glory. ideological and religious dogmas constricting scientific research along with repressive and exclusionary visa and immigration practices lead the way to a rapid decline in creative capital that was once a primary mechanism in US global hegemony. in the metric introduced in the article, the Global Creative Class Index, the US already ranks behind 11 other countries, including Iceland — a statistic that somehow hasn’t reached Icelandic eyes yet, for it is sure to make front-page headlines “Icelanders More Creative Than Americans” when it does.

half-way around the world from the second return. 34 years ago. I was 11. deep in the Maryland countryside. the only thing that foreshadowed the intense development that has taken place in the last 34 years was the publishing of the Montgomery County Master Plan no doubt bought by The Developers like the Kettler Brothers who made huge profits constructing the “new town” of Montgomery Village, complete with zoning and covenant laws so tight that every one was happy.

Today, about two-thirds completed, Montgomery Village is a family-oriented, totally planned, residential environment, close to the burgeoning technical research office industrial “1-270 Corridor.

anyway, the memory of those insects in the woods, the wild woods where I played for days and days through summer sultriness. going far afield, looking at a map, well, the mysterious places were not so far from home, but going down the hill, past the pond, on the earthen dam, up the far side of the valley, past the bank full of terrarium-populating mosses, up to where the first field opened up. this field was most often fallow, while the next was almost for corn. corn that grew eight, nine feet tall by July or so. with leaves that would cruelly paper cut if brushed wrong. leaves that hid us from the dogs when we played hide-and-seek with them. making them sit at the towering green edge, stay Lady, Rusty, stay! walking quickly through the rows, getting as far away as possible, then whistling for them, and crouching silently listening while they ran barking through, high-speed, until they caught our scent and bounded up with barks and slathering tongues. don’t remember how the dogs dealt with the cicadas. I remember the noise and the malevolent-seeming red eyes. at 11 years old.

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!”

It’s a bit strange, sitting on an office chair rescued from the dumpster parked on horrible-cheap 1980′s shag carpeting, pumping out an acoustic signal to a situated live urban-drinking audience halfway around the world. How to get the groove on? The inspiration of the moment has to be local and global at the same time. The senses of the body have to pick up every shred of remote input to judge the reaction, and with only those minuscule bits of evidence plow ahead with faith in connection. “I’m thinking about you!” Concentration, attention, focus are all keywords in the process of throwing embodied energies from here to there, across a network that is defined by thin wires snaking across thousands of kilometers. Connection is where the Self and the Other actually make energized contact, whether it is bridging 2 meters or 20,000 kilometers. neoscenes gets up early (GMT-7), studies the possibilities, brews some tea, maps out a course of action, and dives into the work-play.

First, gather stores of internal energy, then facilitate a material infrastructure, and then, with care-full intensity, send that energy out into the network.

The gathering process is critical. It starts with listening and looking while moving through life, an awareness of the surrounding fields of flow. Keeping the “be here now” above the need to re-produce history. Over time and space neoscenes accumulates a deep archive from this lived process of looking and listening, be-ing. These fragments are a very real energy bank of electromagnetic impulses waiting for the proper moment to be re-configured and revealed. It is from this archive that the remix arises. Serendipitous elements are facilitated in every performance — unstable real-time inputs that reflect the energy of the moment. With the proper concentration, these are combined with a flow from the archive, and whatever remote vibe is coming from the receivers at the other end. It is impossible to guess the result. Except in the deep space of psycho-spiritual anticipation.

Configuring the technological infrastructure is a time-intensive and energy consumptive process — and it’s important not to run out of energy doing that, else the actual performance suffers. Fighting the technology is an old story, not a very nice one, but it comes with this kind of work, it comes with any work involving technology (which raises the question, what exactly IS technology? Well, maybe it’s whatever means any human uses to reconfigure their internal energy in order to pass that energy along to an Other.) A balance between twiddling with tools and the ensuing energy loss must be precisely found. Simple = saving energy for the communicative act itself, not worshipping the binary coders. Creativity happens in unstable autonomous zones.

Finally, the performance. The flow, transmission. Point-to-point. Real time. Is the receiver open to the right frequency? Is the transmission to narrow? Where is the groove, especially when the sonic space is outside rhythm and rhyme. When it is full of Ghosts of the past. Speaking tongues gone by. From ether to ether to ether. And while passing through bodies again and again.

You had to be there. Revolution is a live praxis. But you can still be here now, in which case, you can pick up the vibe still ringing from radiostadt 1, through the trans-temporal ether.

Dad passes this evening. after this long struggle, and a long life. code blue, Janet calls, racing into the hospital. Nancy and Mom there, holding his hands. his heart couldn’t bear more time here. I am just home from school, exhausted. stop what I am doing, and concentrate on a slender thread of consciousness. Light some incense. crumble some sage harvested for just this purpose from the depths of Sand Canyon off the Yampa, press it deep into the palms, smelling the released sweetness. burn some, the smoke mixing with the incense. an intuitive impulse says “write the time now.” on a 3×5 card, I write the time, 6:52. a call comes ten minutes later, he has passed. as birth is the surfacing, death is the submerging of soul back into its own, its transitory place. time shivers, small waves move outward, and the bardo of passing opens. unmeasured intuition and connection. still small voices, suspension of the material presence.
(more …)

what should I write about here? no blogging spew to be had, not that I really care about putting something down each day, hardly have done that in the history of this whole work.

spending time on the archive. looking through old 16mm family films. there are more than 4,000 feet of silent Kodachrome from the 1950′s. mostly Alaska. researching the telecine process going from film to digital video. want to get them all transferred so that folks in the family can actually see them. there used to be a 16mm editing console (manual splicing and viewing unit), but that has long since made its way to the Goodwill or so. so I manually spliced the remaining 100 foot reels together onto 400 foot reels, there are ten or twelve of those along with “The Alaska Movie,” as we call it. a 1600-foot behemoth 45-minute-or-so series of fragments of hunting polar bear by air, Inuit dancers, glacier break-ups, family parties, sledding, trailing moose in the car, panning gold, and on and on.

part of this increasing tendency to archive these days. bought archival storage cases for all Dad’s and Aunt Mary’s slides, amounting to about 7,000 or so. numbered boxes for much of my own small archive of negatives, prints, and other art stuff. seems spurious, out of all the things to do in the world.

so cycling 20 miles in the 100+F heat seems the other thing to do. winds make the difference. with the wind downhill, against uphill.

much time spent taking Dad in for his almost daily hospital visits to get his leg wound looked after. really shocking. shows how much more difficult it is for the body to heal as it ages. eventually there is not enough energy turn-around to bring order back to the system.

for the record, as the university (of Colorado) no longer publishes nor maintains the archive of this magazine, this is the text of an article done by a CU J-School graduate student, Nicole Gordon.

Visiting artist John Hopkins explores relationship between art and technology

After twelve years of living and lecturing in Europe, digital artist John Hopkins is back in the United States. He’s no stranger to the University of Colorado at Boulder; in fact, he earned his master of fine arts degree from CU-Boulder in 1989. These days, however, Hopkins has returned to campus as a visiting artist rather than a student.

“I’ve always had a deep connection to the physical landscape of the West, and intellectually I find Europe stimulating,” Hopkins said. “I’ve attempted to have both, though in the end, physical location is not always important. What is of primary importance is surrounding oneself with humane and positive people — then anything is possible.”

Hopkins’ interest lies at the intersection of art and technology. He describes his work as “art that is not artifact-oriented, but delves into the unique communicative aspects of global networks.”

“John Hopkins has a long-standing commitment to the art network,” said Jim Johnson, interim chair of the Fine Arts Department. “He brings to the department a dedication to art as an ephemeral human process and his work in the digital community has been a natural outgrowth of that dedication. He has inspired numerous art students to pursue art in the real context of one-to-one communication as opposed to the conventional and isolated production of precious objects.”

Hopkins has been a professional artist since 1985. His career has taken him to Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and Austria as a visiting artist or guest lecturer. His art has been recognized at the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria and he has works in numerous private and public collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City.

At CU-Boulder, Hopkins is teaching introductory and advanced digital art classes, as well as working on individual projects with students and doing international performances.

One of his most recent projects at CU-Boulder, in collaboration with students, is a live, online open-platform happening for creative expression and action called di>fusion. The project, which can be experienced at http://neoscenes.net/projects/difusion1/, simultaneously occupies global network spaces and local physical space with collaborative performance, sonic, music, disc- and video-jockeys, text, poetry-slam, and video events.

“I have done similar projects with students across Europe,” Hopkins said. “And indeed, projects like di>fusion are only partially geographically grounded. Much of the project happens in the space of networks, so there are participants and audiences in many locations.”

Hopkins studied geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines as an undergraduate and worked as a geophysicist before pursuing his art career. He says that art and science aren’t so far apart.

“I worked with electromagnetic fields in geophysics, and I’m basically doing the same in art,” he said.

After receiving his art degree, Hopkins found that the European cultural scene suited his ambitions.

“During the decade of the 90s, while the United States was heavily involved in the dot.com bubble inflation and bursting, there were others in other locations who were looking more critically at technological innovation and the rise of global networks,” he said. “These critical views were often coming out of creative cultural research in Europe.”

Hopkins also noted that funding for arts and culture in Europe is much greater than in the United States.

“There have been many opportunities to get funding for creative projects that could never be realized in the U.S.,” he said. “Scandinavia is generally more advanced than the U.S. in terms of technological implementations society-wide, so naturally there were many interesting things happening on the cultural side related to technology.”

An experienced teacher, Hopkins says that he is committed to the dynamics of the learning environment as a critical and important facet of his work.

“I seek to create vital learning spaces — conceptual and physical zones where the exercise of free expression and spontaneous dialogue take place,” he said.

Examples of Hopkins’ work and more information about him can be accessed on his personal Web site at http://neoscenes.net.

the Colorado is sluggish, cloudy, and low. beside the road it passes through many lands that will burn, have already burned, or are burning right now. so it goes.

Glenwood Springs, head for the busy Hot Springs Spa for a few hours. never been in all these years of hot-water soaking elsewhere: it’s expensive, and the water is too hot for a regular workout. but it is extremely clear, salty, and relaxing. the scene is utterly American. chaotic, summertime noisy, full of seemingly satisfied people. I film the scene. there are foreigners there, getting a better deal than only two months ago with the slide of the dollar against the Yen and Euro. I have made 20% on the money that I left in my Merita bank account in Finland. too bad there is only USD 500 in it, had to shift the rest here months ago when the Euro was at its lowest point against the dollar. banks always win, so it goes.

stop at a rest area in Glenwood Canyon, don’t read the instructional signs about the spectacular construction of the interstate in the canyon — well, yeah, I do, and it is all bragging like the eighth wonder of the world — but do appreciate the solar (active/passive) designed toilet complex. shit warmed by the sun. tromb walls, solar water heaters, solar panels for the ventilation fans, banked northern exposure (banked and buried roof), Arcosanti with composting toilets — titillating the tourists from Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Iowa. too bad hardly anybody else builds things like that here in the solar West. form trumps function, so it goes.

and in perused memory, halfway through Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. it’s a detailed and well-researched treatise on water and the West. historical abominations that continue in this day. dams, irrigation projects, the madness of re-directing the flow of energies. of this stupendous place. overheard the phrase “when will the other boot drop?” humankind is wracking up a massive debt of energy that it has re-directed from its necessary flow, like a temper-tantrum with little kids, when they are too much controlled or ignored. they explode with pent-up energies. the world is waiting for this. anybody clever enough to understand that in the present is seen the kernel of the future, look around, and see the word apokalypse printed on each compiled imbalance. the transformative crises (plural!) will grow in cataclysmic intensity. somebody made an artificial polio virus this week, where will that bring us? they ponder if it is alive. it paralyzes mice and kills them. dead. science of science-sake, so it goes.

dam it. so it goes. but we can’t have that! re-route, congregate, compile, merge, co-mingle, and tap off the chaotic flows of the cosmos.

here in this dreamy Colorado location again after five years. an impromptu crossing of paths. long drive from Prescott yesterday, passing through some brewing monsoon storm systems. the first in Gallup, New Mexico, rinsing the Interstate of the red dust that had accumulated for the dry months previous, and a second wave in Durango, Colorado, where the rain was falling heavily on the Missionary Ridge fire area, near Richard’s house. the air was saturated with a sour wet camp-fire smell, and on Route 250, I passed through a corner of the fire area, houses reduced to stone foundations, cars to half-melted piles of steel. forest turned to a sepia and black caricature. over/through the San Juans to Ouray and Silverton, down through Montrose, on by the Black Canyon to Gunnison. the day before Independence Day, when the President declares that there will be Fighter planes protecting all Amurikans on this special day of the celebration of freedom. bleah. I park in Gunnison, off of Main Street to wait for Chris and family to arrive from Boulder. waiting, I manage not to attract the attention of the circulating police patrol cars. at 2300 the traffic signals shift to the blinking yellow or red mode, signaling that this is still one of those towns where night time is the time to be in bed.

Chris tells the story of his flight with Jan von Richthofen, a glider pilot and the great-grand-nephew of the Baron von Richthofen, and doctoral student at the Forschung Zentrum Jülich where Chris was working on a post-doc research position.

well, we flew from the Aachen airport and he wanted to glide over Jülich where I was living, we had to put parachutes on, which I thought was strange. Jan said that we won’t need them unless we have to, and then he would tell me what to do. we apparently flew too far, however, and were beginning to head back, neither talking, while we lost altitude. a high-tension tower came and passed, followed by an audible relaxation in the cockpit, and then the Baron’s great-grand-nephew said we wouldn’t make it back to the airport. we landed in a wheat field, all I could see were stalks of wheat blurring by the cockpit, hoping there wasn’t a tractor or other implement in the field.

we finally stopped, Jan said I should wait there with the glider, while he went for help, catching a ride on a horse cart, telling me to tell any farmer who came that we had insurance for this. I read the insurance papers.

some lady came out walking her dog, a friend of the farmer, then the farmer came out, he recognized that I was an American, but then the farmer’s brother came, and wanted 100 marks because it would take him time to fill out the paperwork and wait for the insurance money. this was not the first time this had happened. we went back to the airport where Jan had to buy everybody a beer.

a hike up Mill Creek to a cirque of brecciated cliffs and hoodoos towering a thousand feet up above the aspen, spruce, and fir. barefoot in the creek, relishing the sensations that seem as strange and enlivening as any impingement to body wall during time passed here, now. drenching rain falling on us on the way back to the car, wet there and the dryness only a few hundred meters further, where the rain did not fall. water and the West.

the carefully tended dirt field, sitting between the Joensuu Technical center where the University Media Department is located, and the new track-and-field center is the scene of changing activities. when I first arrived in September, there was kids football (soccer) matches happening in the afternoon and Saturday mornings. then, one Saturday, there appeared a large group of 30-to-50-something men playing what I would term a Finnish variety of lawn bowling. suited to the available materials, the game pieces consisted of 12 or 14 solid wooden cylinders about 14 cm high and 7cm in diameter, painted orange-red, and two perfectly cylindrical bats (unlike a US baseball bat), each with a smaller diameter end for grasping, and the rest about 8-10 cm in diameter, and maybe 80 cm long. the small pieces were set up, stacked two-high in a line, spaced about 20 cm apart, at one end of the playing field. each player then took turns flinging the wooden bat at the line from a distance of about 20 meters. the object, like bowling, was to knock down as many of the pins as possible. I gave Sanna a call to see if she knew what it was. she didn’t, but called me back later after researching it. turns out the game is called kyykkä. it’s an old Carelian sport that is not commonly played or even known anymore. anyway, that game appeared only once (check out http://www.kyykka.com/ for the full scenario, Finnish only, sorry) and now half the field has been taken over by the installation of two hockey rinks. waiting for the chill. there is an outdoor rink not far away with refrigeration pipes, that was fired up two weeks ago, and there are daily hockey workouts and figure-skating classes held in the middle of a pine forest, near the indoor swimming pool.

public works are apparently locally organized, possibly with some EU support, as this is literally a fringe region. there is the Technology Center, also EU funded, the location of the Media College‘s facility along with tens of small technology companies, the local University Biology Department, and state-of-the-art media (digital teevee and audio) production studios, Cadimef.

yet over all this, repeated in medium-to-large towns across Finland, there doesn’t seem to be much creative output. but maybe this is an outside view — the system internally cranks onwards.

nice dialogue with Geidre about networks and hierarchies. this topic is rising again and again, more and more intensively in the sense that it does appear that society is becoming more and more unstable. it seems clear to many (of us) buried in the crap of the developed world that things cannot go on this way much longer. but are these some kind of educated delusions of apocalypse?

and a pikajoulu (a Finnish excuse to get drunk before the holidays actually begin) with some of the research staff at the lab…

already some place different. two flights yesterday, one from Reykjavík to Oslo over lovely Hekla, who decided with moment’s notice to erupt on Saturday evening. the second flight ends in a heavy Vestfjordene cross-wind and the pilot almost sliding off the runway, just two or three meters from the edge with the leeward wheels. and a hard double bounce with a sharp list in between. not a nice feeling that time. but back in Bergen. rain, and another workshop. interesting situation. complex groupings of beings. needing to continue extending the research into the dynamics of group interactions. chafing at the cafe9.net morass. the conflict between whatever and whatever. in the invisible arena of remote presence. ah, f**ked-up.

massive busy-ness over the weekend with the ~/Connected conference at the Lasipalatsi. Tapio had asked me earlier if I could help out with activities on the ground, and although I was pretty busy anyway, I was around to help, then ended up being quite involved in the discussions, and even made a short public presentation at the end in Bio Rex, dealing with best-practice scenarios for education/learning situations. Polar Circuit was held up as that model in learning situations, along with the idea of open-platform, socially balanced situations.

/~Connected press releases for local and translocal use

Cultural industries and independent media cultural production are of primary importance for Finnish policy development, as a new program, “Content Finland” is being drafted during next year. In each European country, goals of both national and transnational media culture have been met with different strategies. Through /~Connected knowledge and shared experience, it is possible to form models of best practice – and principles for both national and European policy.

The driving force behind this event and series of other meetings prior to it is the ECB, European Cultural Backbone (http://ecb.t0.or.at/, http://www.e-c-b.net/). It is a network of media cultural organizations, centers, and active individuals throughout Europe, not only European Union member countries. To quote Dr. Peter Wittmann, Austrian State Secretary for the Arts, “The European Cultural Backbone is the logical extension of this ongoing dialog between cultural practitioners and policy makers regarding strategies of “practice to policy” on both national and European levels.”

The Main organizer of /~Connected, the Lasipalatsi Media Center, also seeks to discuss how European media centers could increasingly collaborate. How to best connect venues of presenting media culture and sites that produce it? Support of networks, bandwidth, mobility, distribution and production are key factors for policy discussion.

Traditionally, in a European democracy, public space has been defined through access to public institutions, freedom to move in city spaces and through the existence of certain democratic instruments such as public libraries and publicly supported broadcast media. New media, Internet in particular, has made it possible to more actively shift content production to smaller units or groups. Creation of public space can mean support for content production and communication that does not focus on a single mass audience, but particular communities (or consumers) and layers within the larger society and the networked world. Major issue for debate is thus to consider, how to best connect various models of best practice and policy that enable cultural production in a networked, changing Europe.

The seminar takes place in the very center of Helsinki, in Lasipalatsi Media Center (http://www.lasipalatsi.fi). Meals during the conference program are provided for by the organizers and there is no attendance fee. We are providing air fare and accommodation for a group of participants that comes from smaller media centers and organizations. We are happy to assist your travel arrangements by providing information on accommodation and flights.

/~CONNECTED brings together practitioners, producers and policy makers within contemporary media culture in Europe. Its attempts to create exchanges of experience and information between organizations and individuals from different fields: media cultural organizations, media centers, policy makers on a local, national and European level, media art organizations, corporate research labs and university researchers.

Following events such as P2P conference in Netherlands and Networking Centers of Innovation in Austria, it explores the ways in which local experiences can be compared, exchanged and rewritten to form models of best practice.

The event will officially launch the ECB, European Cultural Backbone, a network based on trust and a shared interest to promote a rich media cultural practice, which already flourishes in Europe. The network proposes that an Internet Backbone or a set wide bandwidth would be subsidized by the EU in order to enable transnational media production, broadcast transmission of events and inexpensive communications. The ECB acts as an advisory body for the policy makers nationally and within the EU.

/~CONNECTED is very much about the goals of the ECB:

1) Bandwidth for media culture
2) Support for models of best practice
3) Active investigation of what European media culture consists of
4) Enhanced networking between media cultural organizations, individual hubs” and policy makers.

/~CONNECTED refers to the ways in which media cultural local practices and organizations create collaboration, projects, discourse and policy across and partly independent of national borders. Emerging networks, projects and content are no longer international, but translocal by nature, already connected.

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. FINALLY getting around to exploring the TAZ (Tactical Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why REAL music is inevitably dangerous to READERS). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar.

Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, “rootless cosmopolitanism”). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the “Oasis” issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term “psychic nomadism” here rather than “urban nomadism,” “nomadology,” “driftwork,” etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming-into-being of the TAZ. “The death of God,” in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspectived post-ideological worldview able to move “rootlessly” from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism– able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and “commodity fetishism” have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that “one place is as good as another.” This paradox creates “gypsies,” psychic travellers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact disloyal to the “European Project” which has lost all its charm and vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and adventure… This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals but also migrant laborers, refugees, the “homeless,” tourists, the RV and mobile-home culture — also people who “travel” via the Net, but may never leave their own rooms (or those like Thoreau who “have traveled much — in Concord”); and finally it includes “everybody,” all of us, living through our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, changing jobs, changing “lifestyles,” religions, diets, etc., etc.

Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call “the war machine,” shifts the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even “violent” mode. “God”‘s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time–in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example–that there’s still a lot of “creative destruction” to be carried out by post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally “enemies”) of the old Consensus. These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, “liberated” bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.

These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics–and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises. — Hakim Bey

it IS my praxis. maybe I have missed the expressive techniques of radicalization, but the other side says that radicalization is not needed when the act is revolutionary. the weight of dialogue tips any scale set to compare the volumetric ratio of act to act. what can you compare it to anyway? murder, mayhem, rape, pillage, what violent act of person against human or human-made agent of the oppressive state compares in psychic strength to the dialogue. wars end this way, wars begin this way. Bey misses this somehow, despite his penetrating search of self and brain-stem reflexes. his categories of interaction miss the personal and direct — almost always he is caught up with the imaginary collective both as the object of critique and the object of ultimate continuous transformation. the self and the Other is a conglomerate, a mass, a class of things. hmmmm. finish up with the Doctoral application to Media Lab. Timo comes by last night to the office to look over the application and research proposal with me, and seems to be pleased with it. crossing paths with perceived strong intellect, I at once have a small defensiveness rise in gut, but realize this is worth nothing, and open-ness is worth everything, disperse this and return to living and see that there are significant parallel pathways of thinking. the Dhao speaks loud. straw dogs run away. and, as Anthony said once, it ain’t the Dhao Jones Industrial we are talking about …

finishing touches to the research plan part of the application to the doctoral program at UIAH (University of Art and Design Helsinki) Media Lab. an applied program which I hope might allow me some breathing space to recenter my activities in education and networking. and do things like coagulate bleeding wounds of sensibility:

Me:
>> I mean, can we really afford to ignore the conceptual/spiritual
>> philosophies underpinning the (monolithic) Chinese culture? As well as
>> MANY other basic cultures (including many local manifestations of
>> Christianity in the past 2000 years)? Typical blind-sided-ness of Western
>> Thought patterns! The dematerialization of life is essential, followed by
>> the transformation to the paradigm that all is energy! I love throwing
>> E=mc2 on the board! Energy is the body/mass convolved by the velocity of
>> Light acting upon itself! Conversly, the Body is Light to itself
>> subdivided by its energy…

Mark:
>> write it up dood! hypertextualize it in bodily chunks of light and then
>> link it to other destinations — the writer as networked energy…

glad that somebody thinks this is important. but this has always been a real problem with my work — that each time I have gotten something into a formal, materialized presence, I see how imperfect it is, and indeed, I have never been satisfied with any form of working this stuff out EXCEPT with a smallish intimate and interactive set of participants. everywhere from the slide-show parties back in the late 70′s and 80′s to the camping trips and dinners. why should an artist’s context be something ELSE if one is really intent on opening a dialogue with the Other. otherwise, the chances of opening any kind of connection through the overtly formalized and sterile ploys of the Art World is close to zero. slept with yer gallerist lately? Sanna calls, mmmmm. and have a rolling talk with Loki while he is multi-tasking between me and Saturday morning Tom and Jerry cartoons in Iceland. “Pabby, he just threw a paper airplane out the window … and look now, he opened the front door and the airplane just flew back in, how did that happen?”

enough time for reflection. and restless pacing around relatively known spaces. looking out the window. reality. but the question of what to say on Tuesday evening. public lecture distracts me. structuring a finite period of time into what can be considered organized and clear information is something to be avoided? or just that regular nervousness about not engaging the audience, wasting their time, and that constant awareness of others’ — what they are producing (my critical stance towards the object is merely a translation of the jealousy of those who do create stunning cultural objects as a result of their artistic and other research).

Germany quick visit with Nils at the Media Academy in Köln yesterday, and happen to run into Irit Batsry who is running a video course there. I gush a little about the work of hers that I saw back in Montreal in 1995 — one of the single most powerful videos that I have ever seen. walking between buildings, across Walter Peltzer Platz, Nils points out the two Golden Nica Award statues sitting in the window of the Knowbotic Research offices. later Volker and I go to a Kölsch brauerei for a bit of dinner.

She is Light itself and transcendent Emanating from Her body are rays in thousands — two thousand, a hundred thousand, tens of millions, a hundred million — there is no counting their numbers. It is by and through Her that all things are moving and motionless shine. It is by the Light of this goddess, this Devi, that all things become manifest. — Bhairava Yamala

meet with Udo at dom.de to check into what he has been doing in the last three years. his current work explores relational data bases and how to construct complex navigational interfaces for interacting with the database — using it to construct a hyper-spatial narratives collaboratively. that is the key word — collaboratively — where the work evolves from a collective inter-dialogue which covers many aspects of everyone’s lives. a network constructed by a network! along with some older experiments in data-basing of chats that are then reconfigured on the fly in further chat conversations between bots and humans. very interesting stuff. the work produced for the equator project was one of the first tests. I hope to get him to provide such a space for neoscene occupation people to work in.

and so on. the week already almost over. dinner with Lode and Robert. speaking about the issues at hand. politics of education, politics of learning. and all the time I puzzle on how to best present the subject material, this fundamental concept of a communicative environment within which students might pursue their research and creative activity. it seems to be so new and novel for people. the skin or overlay of technical complexity is also a challenge. one week is really not enough at all.

in the end, I backspace to correct mistakes, erasing up to 20 letters while I sit, surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists, men, maybe on some kind of promotional or business-related travel. they are animated. can I bridge the gap with them? what would be the point? like the drunk guy on the ferry (again) today. he comes to ask me something, but I freeze up. people look through him or away from him, ignoring his singing and talking all the way into Market Square. Niko got me to the ferry at the last minute — his car was stuck in the snow which was falling all day today, heavily. It is about 20C warmer now. but by the time I get the the north, it will be the same there as it was here yesterday. what is it when I sit in the airport, waiting for a flight to board, and just noodle around with this machine. positioning the self. not needing the language of modernity (a hyped-mix of pixellated images and cyber-texts. intervention. processing. wired.) ears popping now. above clouds. horizontal delineations of sky etched in red and blue-grey. leaving Light behind. it was getting bright in Helsinki this week, despite the intense cold. only one more month in, Finland before breaking from Scandinavia for seven weeks. it will be full-tilt springtime when I return. another winter going into the Light. still nothing conclusive with Sanna: the dance of personalities becomes. what. exhausting. no, it is conclusive. I should conclude it. period. yep. that’s it, in making art, I have consistently made the fundamental error of not applying a technique/tool in a research-oriented way. like using a particular medium — my photography as a way of digging into reality and spirituality. not following the classic way of art research.

Sanna goes to Tornio to pick up the video camera and the car, while I hang out at the Kemi library and read magazines. we did not have a good night. I never sleep well on the train, though I prefer to take the night train to or from the north — the day train is paralyzingly boring and tedious. I end up in the bar on the train writing manically through much of the night, and finally crawling back into my bunk, exhausted. she picks me up from the library and we head to the harbor at Aljo, where we meet Eero, the captain and park ranger who will take us to the islands for the night. the boat is a ten-ton speed-boat used for patrolling the area of the national park and conducting research. I study the charts and instruments carefully. we visit two islands first, Sanna making several shots. the main reason she wanted to come and shoot was to capture some scenes of bad weather for her video, which was shot so far under mostly ideal weather circumstances. this is the last weekend Eero will have the boat in the water until next year. the sea here, not being very saline, and the temperatures in winter being well below zero degrees Centigrade, freezes with up to a meter of ice. the islands are accessible by ski and snow-mobile by Christmas, although people seldom visit them. as we sprawl intertwined in the sauna, we are talking about how the entire scene is a perfect script. our long running conversation of the day which has traversed so many levels of emotion and situation, the abrupt shifts of sensuality and language whenever Eero enters the scene, the powerful physical setting, the drama of the weather which eventually threatens to strand us on the island for an indefinite period, the traditional wood-fired sauna — something which is always special to me, as well as to every Finn, and so on. bodies steaming in the night airs.

writing the wrong dates, and so on. things shift from particular to general and back again with a clarity that threatens to consume any parts of social habit previously recognized as (unbreak my heart is sung) acceptable. shifting, shape-shifter, desirer, one who desires. needing, providing, giving. 2100, looking out on the harbor which is haven to submarines, ferries, sculls, yachts, destroyers, tankers, container ships, research vessels, kayaks, and so on. it is still gray-blue sky. on the fringe of entering the Nordic gateways. a few days more and into the realm of Light. alles ist in. fragments, telling, speaking, MEDIATING. interview with a free-lance writer for the local newspaper, tomorrow. where is the most powerful connection of the body to the spirit? it is not necessary to identify this particular interface, but many are concerned about this. images can be shed like skin.

today is the last day I am using words, they’ve gone out, they’ve lost their meaning, they’ve gone out … let’s get unconscious, let’s get unconscious, let’s get unconscious… — Madonna

huh? Jörg, a writer from the local Kieler Nachtrichten, comes to interview me in the morning, we talk at the computer for a couple hours, looking at some of the website. wonder what he will write? he was at the public lecture on Tuesday.

Tervetuloa Suomeen (Welcome to Finland)! Waking up in Pori, Finland, a town on the mid-western coast about five kilometers from the Baltic. It is still cold and gray, heavy clouds full of water. I sleep in until 11 in the morning. Each day of this travel seems harder on my body and mind. But, I suppose a 21-hour day is nothing to pretend is easy. In the afternoon, Jim and I drove to the seaside at a deserted resort near Pori. We walk into the wind down the beach long enough to feel the presence of the earth. The strong and chill wind blew all of the day. Where is spring here? A sauna and dinner is planned at Anna’s cabin in the forest at Noormarkku, about 10 km from Pori. It is a short drive on a sandy road to her beautiful cabin where she lives with her son. Her cabin is one of many buildings of a major estate owned by one of the wealthy Swedish-Finn families involved in the paper/forestry business. It gets colder by the hour and ends up snowing. I thought I would not see any more snow until next winter after the white stuff that dogged me in Vienna a few weeks ago — no such luck. However, the sauna takes the edge off the chill. Birch boughs from last summer – with leaves on them still – are used to slap the body, stimulating the circulation of blood to the skin. They are soaked in cold water first. We roast sausages over the sauna stove to eat for dinner. Anna is managing one of the famous houses designed by the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, near Pori, and, she is preparing to visit the USA for the first time in June to research a number of similar architectural sites. We will meet again in New York City on the 4th of July…

God, the sky is beautiful. And so still. Just the sound of water, near and far. And the wind has died down with the setting of the sun. — Geoffrey Hendricks

I telephoned Julia at Artpool, and it looks like they won’t be around on Friday, so I decide not to spend the extra cash to go to Budapest. I’ve been overly worried about money, although I make sure I eat enough food, but the absurdity of the situation makes me cringe at every shilling/03k/pound/penny/kronur that goes out. Especially when none are coming in. Today I go early to the terminals at the University of Technology library to do some research on the Web. And the day washes over me in a series of visual impressions. From Heironymous Bosch (at the Gemäldegalerie), to works by Asger Jorn (both at the Akademie der bildenden Künste) to various Web sites (essay by Joseph Squier, new entries by Robbin Murphy at artnetweb, uh, drinking coffee and writing this mind-state-wave into the afternoon. Sun, brilliant and warm, finally, spring. No doubt. For what it is worth, I noticed how the work of Bosch was painted from three pigments that corresponded to the Red-Green-Blue (RGB) channels of a color television tube. Hmmm. The students at the Kunst Akademie were marching last night, and the strike involving teachers in some areas of higher education is approaching a critical point. It is unclear to me what exactly the issues are, but they relate to economics and layoffs and lowering of student loan subsidies. I break for a moment to record the birds out the window, they sing at the twiLight at both ends of the Day. Tomorrow I will make an audio snapshot of Vienna. Walking and listening. Today I made some images, but seemingly in a more retrospective mood from times in the past when I would wander aimlessly around whatever city I happened to be in. I was thinking of the two most powerful energy sources for me, sources that input direct into my life-energy, sources of regeneration. Light and Silence. How to source and reference both in work?